Businesses across the globe have boarded the digital space during the recent pandemic. Whether B2B or B2C, these days, every business is actively using digital channels to reach prospects during these pandemic times because of safety concerns and social distancing norms. Email marketing is one of the prominent and conventional digital marketing channels to reach out to the audience. Emails are a great medium to drive brand awareness, leads generation, lead nurturing, customer acquisition and customer retention. Email marketing will not be regarded as outdated if you follow the latest trends of email marketing. Here are a few email marketing trends of 2021 that can boost your marketing ROI.
HOW HAS COVID-19 PROMOTED EMAIL MARKETING?
Over time, social media simplified communication with the audience and has become a mainstream marketing channel, making people assume that traditional email marketing channels are outdated and less profitable. However, change is the law of the universe, and things are quite uncertain in the business and marketing world.
To everyone’s surprise, email marketing recharged in the pandemic hit times. Covid-19 not only changed the lifestyle but also made people more mindful about their choices. In this pretext, emails served a great purpose to make the audience aware of a brand, nurture the leads, acquire and retain the leads, thus making email one of the highly reliable and converting consumer touchpoints.
Thus to revive the regular business, brands will have to revamp their marketing strategy and bring email marketing campaigns to the forefront of their strategy. For this, it is necessary to build a long mailing list; your mail list also helps generate increased traffic and boost your search ranking. While doing so, it is essential to keep up with the latest trends of email marketing to leverage more of its potential.
1.PERSONALIZED EMAILS
Consumers these days have millions of alternate options for every business or product, making it a strenuous task for marketers to hold the prospects. One of the best ways to this is by sending highly personalized emails that cater specifically to every individual reading the mail rather than a common text forwarded to the bulky mailing list.
Consumers are aware that their interests and information are being collected by companies these days, and in return for these, they expect personalized deals and offers. The initial personalization begins with the name of the receiver and goes to the higher-end of customizing the mail content to align with the interests of the receiver.
It has been surveyed that people either delete the mail, opt-out of a mailing list or report it spam when the content of the mail does not align with their behaviour. A higher degree of personalization could not be met when you use basic automation to send mail to millions of people with a single click. However, this is not impossible in this age of AI and high-end technology if you adopt the latest marketing trends.
Leverage Artificial Intelligence in your email marketing campaigns to access the enormous amount of user data available on the Internet, segment the audience based on their interest, and finally serve them highly personalized emails that align with their behaviour and interest. Use robotic process automation and AI to convey the message to every individual rather than to your mailing list in general. If a person feels his/her importance, they will show interest otherwise they have millions of options on the Internet.
2.INTERACTIVE EMAILS
Consumers do not want you to throw some random content, they want you to be interactive with them though it is a promotional mail. Marketers need to understand that people do not hate promotions rather they hate the way the promotion is done. Most of the consumers revealed in a survey by Statista that they love to receive promotional emails from brands that they love. Thus you must send emails that are highly interactive to engage the receivers instead of annoying them.
Interactive emails have a higher engagement, open rate and clickthrough rate. You can include short videos, product animations, gifs, photo carousels, polls, etc., in your mail to make it highly interactive. If consumers abandon their cart before making a purchase, re-target them with a personalized email that has a clear call to action reminding them about their abandoned cart and motivating them to complete the purchase. By motivating, we mean give them a special offer or a giveaway to seal the deal.
Clear CTAs are one of the most interactive elements that if rightly used can boost your conversion rates. Along with CTAs, you can also directly sell your products from the mail using an interactive product page and a shopping cart. This removes the need for a prospect to move out of the email to make a transaction, making the process highly convenient that undoubtedly boosts your conversion rate.
3.STORYTELLING
Humans love stories and so do your prospects. With the aid of interactive content, tell an engaging story via your mail. Have a relevant and fascinating subject line that boosts the open rate. Do not go for those clichéd click baits that people just ignore clicking through. You can also take a step ahead and build a personalized story for the mail receivers that aligns with their behaviour and uses their names. This will fascinate the people, and they will end up clicking the CTA at the end.
4.RECOGNIZING & REWARDING CUSTOMERS
As already stated above that people love brands that give consumers due respect and importance. Taking personalization a step ahead, you can retain customers by sending personalized messages thanking them for their support. Brands these days are more into these thanksgiving and customer appreciation emails as it generates a better response from the prospects. Send them birthday wishes along with personalized discounts, give them exclusive early access to a sale for being a valued customer and reward them for promoting your brand to their friends. These are age-old marketing techniques for customer retention that has to be updated and incorporated into your email marketing campaigns.
5.OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE DEVICES
Most of the online activities happen on mobile devices by the consumers giving you ample reason to optimize your emails for the mobile layouts. If your mail content is not optimized for mobile devices, people will not even think twice before deleting the mail. Even the interactive content that you use must be highly optimized for mobile view for maximum output.
6.MINIMALISM
The digital audience today prefers an uncluttered and simple form of communication. That straightly indicates you must go for a minimalistic mail without much ado. Keep your message simple with straightforward CTAs, and do not confuse or bore the readers with irrelevant details. The design, the font, the message and the subject must be simple yet engaging.
E-mail marketing is a gold mine for businesses to generate leads and then convert those leads. To populate a converting mailing list, you must analyze whom to target by defining a target audience. Have a clear understanding of your target audience and buyer persona to personalize the emails and follow the latest email marketing trends to leverage the highly converting digital marketing channel. If you are also looking to boost your marketing ROI with highly converting email marketing strategies, connect with Entitledarts, the leading digital marketing agency in Hyderabad, India. We help clients across the globe to bring a 360-degree digital transformation and build a brand out of their business.